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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Novell's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft for destroying the market for WordPerfect and QuattroPro can now move forward. The Supreme Court denied certiorari to Microsoft's appeal of an appeals court ruling, which is the fancy legal way of saying they ignored Microsoft's appeal and let the previous ruling stand. Novell's complaint is an interesting read, because some of this sounds quite familiar, given how Microsoft is now forcing the standardization of OOXML. Statements like, 'As Microsoft knew, a truly standard file format that was open to all ISVs would have enhanced competition in the market for word processing applications, because such a standard allows the exchange of text files between different word processing applications used by different customers,' and 'Microsoft made other inferior features de facto industry standards,' sound a lot more recent."

The problem is, matter of factly, that nothing competes with Office as it stands. Nothing. Not OpenOffice, not Apple's Keynote/Pages, or anything else.

Microsoft has to have its hand forced. Look at Internet Explorer. Firefox came out, was a BETTER browser, and now Microsoft is finally promising standards compliance in IE8. It may, or may not be the case that it will happen, but enough to realize that they have to beat Firefox on its own turf, since it is now the superior browser.

All I am saying is, that if you can beat the MS Office suite of products, then you can win against Microsoft. But that's a product that is really, really good.... and I don't see it as MS taking the fight lying down either.

Back in the Day, Word Perfect WAS better. But because you couldn't import files from MS's solutions, and MS used it's well-documented anti-competitive practices to push their productivity offerings, the net result was harm to Word Perfect's viability.

Whether or not Word Perfect could have continued to compete based on merit is a moot point because Microsoft's practices DIDN'T GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO DO SO

I was working in tech support at a building engineering company in 1997 - lots of big contracts, lots of specification documents, lots of complex calculation sheets - and I was there during the migration from WordPerfect 6.1 & Quattro Pro 6.0 to Microsoft Office 97.

We migrated because our clients started putting clauses in their contracts that all documents and calculation sheets had to be supplied electronically as Microsoft Office documents. There was absolutely no other justification for the migration. Our customers basically forced us to buy Office 97 or they were going to take their business elsewhere. I have no idea why they did this, but I'm guessing Microsoft's 'corporate awareness' strategies must have had something to do with it...

MS Office was more expensive, and required more powerful (i.e. expensive) PCs. It was technically inferior - users would waste hours tracking down formatting bugs in Word that would have succumbed to WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature in a few seconds; Excel didn't support some fairly obvious features (e.g. copy/paste of '3D' blocks of cells across multiple worksheets) that our Quattro users used daily. We had invested heavily in development of macros and templates for WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, most of which ended up being scrapped because there was no way to migrate them.

You have no idea how frustrating it was explaining to engineers - technically literate, intelligent, capable users - that they were no longer allowed to use the tools they'd spend time familiarising themselves with because Microsoft had somehow persuaded our customers to insist that we used an inferior product.

Sure, ten years later, MS Office has overtaken them, and any company trying to compete with Microsoft in the desktop office market have their work cut out for them to say the least - but I honestly believe that Office 95 and 97 killed WordPerfect, and I don't believe they did it by being cheaper, faster or more powerful.

1) Microsoft apparently was deliberately allowing piracy of
Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products. I know this because I called
the Microsoft legal department, accused them of allowing piracy, and forced
them to stop some of the local pirate outlets. In response, Microsoft brought
one court case. But the other pirates continued. Later Microsoft made it
impossible to contact their legal department.

Legitimate suppliers of alternative products could not compete because
computer customers were being offered pirated copies of Microsoft Office for
$50 when bought with a computer -- or less.

2) The people who owned most of the WordPerfect stock did not WANT to
compete. You can read the book about this written by the COO of WordPerfect,
Almost Perfect, available online [fitnesoft.com].

My opinion is that Microsoft allowed piracy, and that was the biggest
contributing factor toward the failure of competitors.

$50? Man,they were getting ripped off.Most places I remember from 95-'00 would just GIVE you the damn thing if you bought a box from them.And it was well known that MSFT didn't care about Win98 piracy,which is how,along with giving sweetheart deals to OEMs,pretty much killed competition from other OS and Office suppliers. Wasn't it Bill Gates himself that said "if they are going to pirate,I want them to pirate from us"?

I wish them luck,but so far MSFT lately has been their own worst enemy.First Vista(slow and painful) then Office 2K7(confusing and half my shortcuts don't work) and finally getting ready to kill XP(are they REALLY thinking Home Basic on a Wal Mart special is anything but torture?).Maybe this will give someone a chance to come up with a great competitor to Office.OO.o is great on newer machines,but I've found on older office equipment Office 2K just runs better.But as always my 02c,YMMV.

I agree with you completely. I was there too. I saw that MS took over not because Office is better than what was available, but because it came bundled with the OS. The prevailing thought of the day was why pay twice for a spreadsheet? MS bullied their way into the office desktop. It DID require bigger hardware. Access had easter eggs in it that were bigger than the competition's product!

Have you EVER done a serious document in Word? Even with 2007 you still need reveal codes, which isn't there. You may not have had use for Wordperfect's features, but people who actually used the power of a word processor and needed more than something like Wordpad provides Wordperfect was, and in many cases still is, better.

I spend hours at work cursing and shouting just because of the way MS software handles figures. They never are the size you want, the never appear at the place you tell them to appear, and when you edit a bit of text they walk away. And MS never understood that a caption is supposed to stay under or above the figure. It drives me nuts!

Not sure if you're serious or trolling, but when Excel first came out it certainly didn't blow away Quatro Pro, it was a feature poor piece of crap by comparison and as for

WordPerfect blew it in the business world when they couldn't figure out how to work correctly with standard Windows print drivers

Isn't that perhaps a result of anti-competitive monopoly abuse by MS? Didn't they get done for similar exclusionary behaviour towards Lotus-123 ? Aren't Europe still trying to get them to release the full spec of the Windows API ?

Back in the Day, Word Perfect WAS better. But because you couldn't import files from MS's solutions, and MS used it's well-documented anti-competitive practices to push their productivity offerings, the net result was harm to Word Perfect's viability.

Whether or not Word Perfect could have continued to compete based on merit is a moot point because Microsoft's practices DIDN'T GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO DO SO

As I pointed out in another thread, Microsoft did use predatory pricing to make Word the market leader. However, WordPerfect also had a number of other problems.

But because you couldn't import files from MS's solutions

This was, in fact, a failing of WordPerfect, because Microsoft made sure you could import them the other way around.

The question is, how long did it take the WordPerfect Corporation* and/or Novell to add this to WordPerfect?

As I recall, Novell was also slow about producing a GUI version of WordPerfect. When they did make a GUI version, they ran into the problem where "WordPerfect's function-key-centered user interface did not adapt well to the new paradigm of mouse and pull-down menus, especially with many of WordPerfect's standard key combinations pre-empted by incompatible keyboard shortcuts that Windows itself used (e.g. Alt-F4 became Exit Program as opposed to WordPerfect's Block Text)." -- Wikipedia, WordPerfect [wikipedia.org]

As far as I can tell from Wikipedia's Microsoft Office Word [wikipedia.org] article, early versions of Word used menus rather than direct keyboard shortcuts, meaning that they had a much easier time moving to a GUI. Although, Microsoft did later steal a number of keyboard shortcuts from Apple.

This was, in fact, a failing of WordPerfect, because Microsoft made sure you could import them the other way around. The question is, how long did it take the WordPerfect Corporation* and/or Novell to add this to WordPerfect?

WordPerfect used marked up text that was easily readable, and provided the specification. MS Word used an intentionally obscured binary format that actually included random data from the hard disk (sometimes including "deleted" files that were recoverable using third party tools). Worse, MS Word also read and wrote Rich Text Files, which they made the standard for file transfers on the Windows OS. They intentionally changed both of these formats constantly to keep third parties from accurately reverse engineering them for compatibility.

Your assertion that this was a problem with WordPerfect is true, but it was an artificial problem Microsoft created using their desktop OS monopoly, which is one of the reasons why MS has been losing their absurdly drawn out case.

As I recall, Novell was also slow about producing a GUI version of WordPerfect.

They were only a year and a half behind Word for GUI (WYSIWYG) but they were another year behind in bringing it to Windows.

When they did make a GUI version, they ran into the problem where "WordPerfect's function-key-centered user interface did not adapt well to the new paradigm of mouse and pull-down menus, especially with many of WordPerfect's standard key combinations pre-empted by incompatible keyboard shortcuts that Windows itself used

Actually, WordPerfect switched to a tool palette menu that was very highly reviewed and pretty much universally considered superior to Word's later toolbar format, but MS redefined the UI guidelines for Windows such that WordPerfect had to scrap their existing GUI and quickly implement a toolbar. That is, in fact, one of the antitrust complaints.

I think it is pretty easy to see that MS was unfairly creating artificial problems with WordPerfect that were not problems in Word, using their Windows monopoly. They used secret APIs, constantly changed their formats, and repeatedly made changes to Windows that disadvantaged WordPerfect. In short, they are guilty as hell, but such a ruling comes so late that the market is utterly destroyed and there is no real competition. The biggest competitors left for MS Office are WordPerfect (leftover stronghold niches and alternate platforms), OpenOffice (run as a communal copyleft, nonprofit project to exclude it from traditional market pressures), and iWork (only available on a niche platform that has an entire vertical chain of hardware: OS: end-user apps to bypass MS's desktop monopoly influence). It is pretty clear there is no capitalist free market at work for office suites and any monetary compensation may make Novell shareholders a little happier, but is far too late to help consumers. Hopefully the EU courts will prove to be more efficient, faster, and actually do something to make MS create the best product at the lowest price if they actually want to make sales.

As I recall, Novell was also slow about producing a GUI version of WordPerfect.BTW: WordPerfect Corp. (before Novell bought them out) was the one dragging its heals on the GUI.Why?Because they though Windows 3.0 was going to flop.When Windows 3.1 came out and caught on big, WPC released WordPerfect 5.2 for windows.WordPerfect 5.2 was a dog and the rest is marketing...

This was, in fact, a failing of WordPerfect, because Microsoft made sure you could import them the other way around.

And how do you figure that? Does Microsoft have a record of documenting its formats openly, in a way that's implementable by third parties? Does the acronym "OOXML" mean anything to you? Just possibly the same pernicious crap they pull today was being pulled in the 80s and 90s. Just possibly...

You must have forgotten Word Perfect 6.0. Terrible printer support, couldn't support high resolution monitors without specific WP drivers that noone wrote. It was super slow, a memory pig, and didn't support Truetype fonts (Or any kind of fonts). Everyone hated it. That's what called WP.And that was WP's solution to Microsoft Word, where you could drag and drop pictures, screenshots, etc and move them around the document with ease. Sorry, but for anyone trying to do layout at the time WP was a DOG. Wo

WP5.1 for DOS? Probably the best DOS-based word processor ever. Clear market dominance. In those days people mostly laughed at Word.

WP6 for Windows? Steaming pile of crap. They completely did not get the user interface shift that was happening and the new possibilities that a GUI provided until it was much, much too late.

It's up to the courts to ultimately decide if Microsoft played fair or not, but what's not in question is that, at best, they were fighting dirty (kind of pathetic now that I think about it) to beat a competitor who was already doing a great job of beating themselves. Kind of like kicking WordPerfect in the groin once after WordPerfect inexplicably chugged a bottle of hull cleaner and repeatedly fell on its sword.

WP6 for Windows? Steaming pile of crap. They completely did not get the user interface shift that was happening and the new possibilities that a GUI provided until it was much, much too late.

I respectfully disagree that they didn't understand what GUI was capable of.In this [youtube.com] video of NeXTstep 3, Jobs does a short demo of WordPerfect at about 6:15. The comments of the video date it around 1993. However, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] there was only 1 version of WordPerfect for NeXT; that was released in 1991. Thats

I agree with your post wholeheartedly. Luckily around the time 6 was out, I switched to Linux, and WP had Linux versions of their software. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in WP7 back in 1999, and I laughed at the people who struggled with Word. Our university back then had decided that everything MS did was good and they were to be worshipped, and it's surprising how many scientists believed that. My vision of scientists as independant, self-relying people who don't usually take things they are told for granted wa

I'm sorry, but you're wrong.In 1992 I was working in computer lab on campus. All the Windows terminals (running Win 3.11, or Win 3.0 if they accidentally booted off the local drive instead of doing a network boot, like they were supposed to), had MS Word 5.

I was using WordPerfect 6 on my computer back in the dorm (and later version 6.1, 6.2 and 7... which suffered in performance). I was introduced to both platforms simultaneously, and I was consistently amazed at how much more difficult it was to do some

I double that. The only time I ever used WordPerfect was on Windows 3.1 on my dad's computer and after a while I just failed to comprehend, how a) someone would pay money for such a piece of shit (WP and Windows, that is) and b) could even try to run a business on such a piece of shit software.

Back in the Day, Word Perfect WAS better. But because you couldn't import files from MS's solutions, and MS used it's well-documented anti-competitive practices to push their productivity offerings, the net result was harm to Word Perfect's viability.

Whether or not Word Perfect could have continued to compete based on merit is a moot point because Microsoft's practices DIDN'T GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO DO SO

I'm here to tell you that Wordperfect still works just fine, and yes, it is better than Word. Our law office uses Wordperfect 10, and nobody wants to switch any time soon. I expect we'll upgrade to Wordperfect X3 (yes, Corel is still making new versions of Wordperfect) before we ever switch to Office. I know that our office, though in the minority, is far from singular in continuing to support Wordperfect over Word, despite the fact that Microsoft Office formats dominate electronic Court filings in my nec

Think back to the early 90s, WordPerfect ruled the land. Then Sweet William emailed his minions instructing them to deliberately withhold the knowledge of Windows' inner workings, so that Novell would be left out in the cold. The relevant quote from Ars Technica's front page story-

"I have decided that we should not publish these extensions," wrote Gates. "We should wait until we have away to do a high level of integration that will be harder for likes of Notes, WordPerfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage... We can't compete with Lotus and WordPerfect/Novell without this."

Actually, WordPerfect Corporation was dead set against creating a Windows version for a long time. When they finally did so reluctantly, it was a half-assed job. Of course, the silliest part of this suit is that WordPerfect and Quatro were already failing products before Novell bought them. Otherwise WordPerfect Corp and Borland wouldn't have sold them to Novell in the first place.

Many office product worked just fine before the day of MS Office. Microsoft used the 800 pound gorilla standard as a means of purging the market of all but their own. That is not technical elegance wins the day, that is not ease of use wins the day, that is not fair competition of features, abilities and ideas. and that is certainly not sticking to or even creating a new standard.Novell had perfectly good Apps what crushed the certainly was not a superior product. And here we go ag

The problem is, matter of factly, that nothing competes with Office as it stands. Nothing. Not OpenOffice, not Apple's Keynote/Pages, or anything else. OK, this case isn't about OpenOffice or anything else currently available for you to buy. This case isn't about standard file formats. This case is about Microsoft using their Windows Monopoly to kill off competing products.

Back in the day. they didn't bundle computers with Word Perfect/dBase/Quatro Pro (Which was better than Excel at one point). Microsoft forced Windows Licensees (computer makers) to carry Microsoft Works, which was in fact, Microsoft Office starter edition. Computer makers could not sign deals with software vendors (bundling) such as Borland, Word Perfect Corp. or any other without having their Windows License fees raised.

If there was any innovations in Spread Sheet/Word Processing technology to make, we will never know. Microsoft killed off all the commercial competition using the Windows License Fee of Death (LFoD?). To see that Google Desktop Search is bundled with a new Dell XP/Vista computer shows you how much Microsoft has been neutered by the DOJ.

Two reasons. First many very large customers want them to do so. Second, because it provides a level playing field with everyone competing based upon the merits of their offerings.

The problem is, matter of factly, that nothing competes with Office as it stands. Nothing. Not OpenOffice, not Apple's Keynote/Pages, or anything else.

Then what is the harm of implementing ODF natively in MS Office? If MS's offerings are better based upon real merits, then implementing ODF natively improves their offering and should get them more sales. Why would they fight so hard against it?

The truth is, MS word is a very poor choice for a lot of people. People who want to to home publishing of a newsletter on their Mac, are probably better off using Pages, especially given how much cheaper it is. Schools who have limited budgets are probably better off using OpenOffice because it is free and they can run it on Linux based labs as well as Windows and Macs and both in the school and at home, all with the same versions and all without any format incompatibilities. It just isn't practical for a school to provide students with a "standard" version of Word that will run on all the machines in the school and in the home (even old ones). For people who are itinerant minstrels traveling from town to town and writing in public libraries, it is a lot easier to use Google Documents via a Web browser than it is to have a copy of MS Office and try to get it installed by the administrators of the library.

The above are just a few examples. Microsoft has intentionally avoided ODF and are, in fact trying to kill it off as a standard because they want all those people and everyone else to either buy and use MS Office, or use a product that is always going to be second rate as it tries to reverse engineer whatever half-assed format MS is using. They don't want their to be fir competition or for it to be easy for users to buy a product better suited to their needs (which may be inferior in many ways for many uses, but not for that user).

Microsoft has to have its hand forced. Look at Internet Explorer. Firefox came out, was a BETTER browser, and now Microsoft is finally promising standards compliance in IE8.

Firefox has been a better browser for many years and MS has been promising "better" standards compliance forever. That doesn't mean they will actually do it. They haven;'t even made promises to do better for most Web standards, just "better" for a small subset. Both IE and MS Office are examples of the free, capitalism market being undermined and consumers suffering retarded innovation, high prices, and inferior products as a result.

All I am saying is, that if you can beat the MS Office suite of products, then you can win against Microsoft.

Okay, say you're an investor. You have a few hundred million in capital to invest. You can invest in piezoelectrics or office suites. The former maker s not monopolized so if you invest in it, the return is likely to be proportional. The latter market is monopolized and you'll be going up against a competitor who can introduce artificial problems with your product by breaking compatibility. Worse yet, they have a related monopoly and can use hidden APIs to get better performance on pretty much all computers, while they can introduce "bugs" with every service pack that will slow down or break your product. Sure you can invest in that, but it will take a lot more capital to get a lot smaller return, and ost companies that have tried have died (some who even had superior offerings at the time). Where do you put your investment capital?

The courts need to act against MS and provide investors and competitors with some faith that antitrust laws will be effectively enforced and competition will be fair. Right now, investors do not have that opinion because the courts have largely ignored MS's abuses and the settlemen

I'm sorry to say there's nothing in Office that most business needs to compete with....Never had a need for it. As a matter of fact I've never had a need for proprietary formats. Once you get that out of the way there is nothing that office offers that can't be achieved by other programs. If Office is your tool fine by you but Office in no way can meet my expectations just by the simple fact that it's limited to one platform (please don't say it's available for the Mac,Word may be somewhat compatible, Excel

See I look at it like this: If I am a little fish (Microsoft, circa 1989) and want to win marketshare, I create a standard and promote it. That may be hard for some to accept, but Microsoft acted smartly -- develop your own standard and get people to jump on the bandwagon. I remember Wordperfect it was great up to version 5.1 and then Microsoft bought Ami (a little French word processing company) shortly after releasing windows and tweaked it to make MS Word. While some may claim that Wordperfect was th

Your right, I did forget about Lotus buying them. However, my arguement still stands about not liking the current playing field, so you make your own. Companies do it all the time, the good ones (or rather the ones who are good at it) win. Others fall by the waste side. At that time it was Microsoft, now its new players. Its simple really. Whoever is on top is gonna be challenged for that top position.

You misunderstand: WordPerfect stored its files in a proprietary markup language. (It wasn't exactly hard to get the specifications; all you had to do was ask.) There was a special key combination (Alt-F3, if memory serves) that toggled Reveal Codes mode. In that mode, the screen was split into to halves. In the upper, you had the regular display. In the lower, you could see all the markup and edit it. That way, if you'd accidentally entered (let's say) a new margin by accident, you could see exactly were it was and remove it. I've known people who learned the program by having Reveal Codes on at all times so that they could see the effects of what they were doing and learn how the program worked.

I've known people who learned the program by having Reveal Codes on at all times so that they could see the effects of what they were doing and learn how the program worked.

There were legions of middle-aged secretaries who did the very same day in and day out. The rest of their time, when they weren't yakking on the phone or doing their nails, they managed a directory structure to store their work, formatted floppies, filled in time sheets, printed out mailing labels, and generally maintained their systems... all from the command-line.

I think your memories are overly idealized. Most of those secretaries saved all of their files in the C:\WP51\ directory, and the only way they could find anything was using the fullscreen file browser program that came with WordPerfect. If they used the command line at all, they had a cheatsheet taped to their monitor.

But it doesn't really matter because businesses got rid of most of their secretaries after GUI word processing became popular.

Not that idealised. Steve Yegge's blog contains a delightful story about Amazon's original customer service system which ran under emacs and was written in elisp, mainly (I think) by him. He says he was cornered at a reunion by some secretaries who preferred the old emacs system because it was so easy to customise.

People program stuff all the time quite happily if they don't know it's programming:)

You misunderstand: WordPerfect stored its files in a proprietary markup language. (It wasn't exactly hard to get the specifications; all you had to do was ask.) There was a special key combination (Alt-F3, if memory serves) that toggled Reveal Codes mode. In that mode, the screen was split into to halves. In the upper, you had the regular display. In the lower, you could see all the markup and edit it. That way, if you'd accidentally entered (let's say) a new margin by accident, you could see exactly were it was and remove it. I've known people who learned the program by having Reveal Codes on at all times so that they could see the effects of what they were doing and learn how the program worked.

Why do you speak in the past tense? Reveal Codes is awesome (it's the only thing that makes importing Word documents tolerable), and you can take it away when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Wordperfect FTW

Having a DreamWeaver-like split view like that was an acceptable solution for people like you and me who understand the relationship between underlying markup and rendered text. One troubling side effect, however, was that when you hit the right-arrow key to advance forward a few characters in the default WYSIWYG mode, the blinking cursor would move forward a character, pause, MOVE BACK a character or two, then move forward a character, all the while you were arrowing right. This is because WP was with ea

I remember using it in high school ('99?) and how the format you saved in, by default, was simply a type of marked up text; in the editor, you could go to a certain mode that would allow you to edit out the markup code itself (a lot like a wysiwyg editor for html, but... well, html isn't really known for any kind of real word processing). This was so powerful, and when I had a class on Word, I hated it didn't have that feature.

If WordPerfect could read/write ODF, I would go out and buy a legitimate copy (no, I don't even have a pirate copy - it's useless unless you don't need to share your document with others).

WordPerfect made sense. I'm glad justice is (possibly) on it's way to be served.

W.E. Peterson joined WordPerfect in 1980 as a part time office manager and left as Executive V.P of Sales in 1992. Almost Perfect [amazon.com]

"Listen" would be the theme for 1990.

In January Microsoft offered to make us a beta test site for Windows 3.0. We accepted their generous offer, but did little more than look Windows over. In hindsight, it is easy to see we should have done much more right away.

Some of us were ready to postpone OS/2 in favor of Windows, but the programmers in the OS/2 group, who had also been given the assignment of eventually creating the Windows version, were not ready to give up on OS/2. They were making good progress and hated the idea of starting over... They wanted to believe in IBM, as did the rest of us. The failure of OS/2 meant having to play on a field owned and operated by Microsoft, with Microsoft making the rules.

In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.

WordPerfect Office was turning into a big problem. The program was useful, but it had a few weaknesses. The directory services, which listed all the people on the mail system with their electronic addresses, could not hold more than one or two thousand people. The schedular, which could be used to put together a meeting, was slow and sometimes unreliable. Installing the program was a very difficult process.

1991...was our year to "think."

Our biggest [problem] was the continued delay in the shipment of WordPerfect for Windows. Just one week after Fall COMDEX in 1990, the Windows programmers informed us that the dates we had given...would be impossible to meet.... We were in deep trouble.

We...took too long to make our experienced DOS programmers get involved. They could have helped a little more, but we had a hard time convincing them that the Windows project was more important than anything else. With sales still going up, many thought things were going too well to be concerned.

One big problem was getting all the different Office development groups to work together. By now we had teams for PC networks, for the Macintosh, and for UNIX, DG, and DEC machines. Unfortunately, none of the groups seemed to be willing to work out their differences.

Our long term success was, I thought, dependent on diversity. If the world was filled only with Windows machines, then Microsoft would have a tremendous advantage. If instead the world was filled with DOS, Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, and UNIX machines, we could maintain our advantage in the personal computer word processing market.

Our theme for 1992 was "focus."

We were...disappointed by the lukewarm WPwin reviews. The reviewers complained that the product was a little slow and a little buggy, and they were right. Long gone were the days when I could take a WordPerfect review home and be certain I would enjoy reading it.

We needed to get a cleaner and faster version of WPwin out the door, but it would take some time. Microsoft was heavily promoting DDE (dynamic data exchange)... In theory, if we wrote our program to support Microsoft's specifications, a WPwin document could give and receive information to and from other programs. Instead of releasing another version of WPwin right away, the programmers wanted to delay the release so the new feature could be included..

DDE tho seemingly useful in the day really turns out to be nothing. It was hard to implement DDE perfectly. I remember thinking that there were a lot of technologies that were going to go nowhere and that a lot of companies such as Lotus Development and Word Perfect were going to go the way of the DoDo if they didn't realize this. People were interested in simple solutions with lots of features while Microsoft was driving the trade journals using their advertising dollar to get the reviewers to demand ev

Except I was naive enough to follow their advice, and it hosed our domain server. So when I called them back they wanted me to crack my wallet before they would fix the problem they caused. I sent through several levels of supervisors and finally got someone to promise to call me back... then I did what I should have done in the first place and checked online (Usenet, this was before Google) and had everything fixed and working by the time they got back to me.

Untrue. I lived the era. WP started as a group of guys writing an editor on larger computers, like a lot of software engineers did.

I've read more books on the industry that the author of that book and many others combined. And I read them during the time this was happening. I'll take my experience and education over some dork who thought he might make money on an inaccurate book.

As someone who used Word Perfect, then Word Perfect Suite, for many years, I will tell you straight-up and without any question that it blew the doors off Word and Office. I've still got original editions of WP Suite 7 and Office Professional 9, though I've long-since been forced to put them on the shelf.

The triumph of Microsoft Office was a triumph of mediocrity and bloat over quality.

Part of the reason WordPerfect lost favor was because Microsoft was dumping [wikipedia.org] Office at a price WordPerfect couldn't compete at. It wasn't until after Microsoft established a majority presence that they raised Office's price to the prices we see today.

At that point, most businesses had already retrained their staff on Word and started saving files in.doc format.

Before you ask, no, I personally don't have any references to back this up other than my memory.

Part of the reason WordPerfect lost favor was because Microsoft was dumping Office at a price WordPerfect couldn't compete at. It wasn't until after Microsoft established a majority presence that they raised Office's price to the prices we see today.

I remember those days and I don't remember MS dumping. Yes, they were cheaper at the time IIRC, but dumping? No. Wordperfect back then was the king of the word processors.

Microsoft were looking the other way and whistling, while everyone who had one of the newfangled CD-writers was giving away copies of "MS Office 97 - Gold Disk Edition" for a big fat duck-egg. That's practically indistinguible from dumping.

There was no way that anybody who acquired a pirated copy of Office would ever have paid full whack for it; without the option of piracy, and because magazine type-ins had already disappeared but Open Source wasn't yet mainstream, they would have installed alternative

I'm not badanalogyguy, but I'm going to play him on/. for right now.If I'm in a car accident with a drunk driver, and I become paralyzed, and I sue for damages, I find it highly suspect that the drunk driver could say "I didn't do anything wrong; look at him! He was eating too many twinkies anyway, and was going to be dead in a few months regardless!" That's not a valid argument. It may be true, but it's really beside the point. The point here is "did Microsoft engage in abuse of their desktop OS monop

By the time OEMs were bundling Works with Windows, the game was already over. Prior to that time WordPerfect was the leading Word Processor so Word's file formats had nothing to do with it.

WordPerfect was designed from the ground up to be a non-GUI application. The fact that the product presented you with a blank sheet uncluttered by menus (until very late versions) was a bragging point. It was a very efficient interface for those who spent hours day after day using it. In other words it was great for the secretarial business model (that's why it's still effective for law offices). Unfortunately for WordPerfect, this model was in decline. The new market was for people who didn't use a word processor all day and just wanted to get up to speed quickly.

I suspect you think I'm one of them. Mind un-foeing me if that's the case? I like what you say for the most part, but I think at one point we were at odds about mono in one comment thread. If you didn't think I was a twitter puppet then keep me foe'd because I meant everything I said, but if you foe'd me because you thought I was twitter, I'd prefer that be undone.

Umm, dumping doesn't mean what you think it means. The competitor's selling point is immaterial, of course. It would be rather stupid to define "dumping" as having greater efficiency or lower costs. No, in fact dumping has absolutely nothing to do with how much your competitor needs to sell their product for. I'll let you go figure out what dumping really means.

While twitter has at times shown zealotry, the GP post shows no signs of it. If you can't refute the post based on its actual content, don't resort to an attack on past character. If that's the best retort you have, perhaps you shouldn't respond.

"People were shifting between companies all the time back then. Microsoft weren't some alien group, they were people with exactly the same goals and level of experience as the competition. They just had the superior business model for the day. Back then things were nasty, but they were nasty all round, it's just fashionable to only remember microsofts bad deeds."

Business model has nothing to do with it. Talking key decision makers within the Federal government to standardize on Windows and Office has everything to do with it. Nobody I worked with at the time was gung-ho to switch to Windows or Office, we did so because our customers (the Feds) mandated that all future submissions had to be in Word or Excel format.

Microsoft as much as anything is a US Government created monopoly, and the Feds (using taxpayer money) funded a whole new round of spending on PCs and related software for which the existing infrastructure was ill prepared (and still hasn't recovered; witness continuing loss of e-mail and other documents due to conflicting or non-existent internal document standards).

Hopefully wide adoption of something like ODF (and not OOXML) by Europe and other countries will cause US decision makers to finally get a clue (I'm only cautiously optimistic though as they are a fairly clueless bunch). I remain concerned that some people mistakenly see support of Microsoft as the patriotic thing to do when in fact it has hastened the dumbing down of most of the people exposed to it. I know, you won't believe me anyway.

It wasn't a fair contest, so they didn't lose in the way a tennis player loses. They lost in the way a mugging victim loses. What you refer to as a business model is what I call organized crime.

Fashion has nothing to do with why we remember microsoft's bad deeds. With so many M$ fanboys running around, it's quite unfashionable. We remember them because as professionals and as consumers, *we* are still being punished by what they have done and *they* have yet to pay for it.

it's just fashionable to only remember microsofts bad deeds.
Remember their bad deeds? When did they have a good one? Microsoft has been doing bad deeds for so long now they even have the public believing what they do is correct. Microsoft knows only 2 rules:
1. Buy up the competition.
2. If #1 doesn't work, change the code so they cannot compete.

They, just like Microsoft, were more interested in making money then they ever were in providing consumer choice,

Your argument is wrong on so many levels...

Word Perfect made its product available on the MacIntosh, Amiga, Apple ][gs, Atari ST, DOS, Windows, Solaris, and VAX systems. What platforms did Microsoft write Office for? What Windows fees did Microsoft charge computer makers for not bundling Microsoft Office/Works versus the ones who did?

Did Microsoft offer matching Marketing funds (paid by you for your non choice of an Operating System when purchasing a PC) to computer makers who bundled PFS Windows Works with their Windows based computers instead of computer makers who chose to bundle Office/Works? No, they didn't.

Is Microsoft evil? No. Are they greedy? Yes. Is there any room for competition within the Microsoft Windows sphere of influence? That remains to be seen. Am I running Linux? Yes. Am I biased? Yes. I haven't had to pay for upgrades or reinstall any Windows machines in my house since switching to Ubuntu. Zero downtime.

Word Perfect made its product available on the MacIntosh, Amiga, Apple ][gs, Atari ST, DOS, Windows, Solaris, and VAX systems.

They also made WordPerfect for Linux, which (itself being closed source) was a massive commercial failure. Most Linux adopters at the time weren't interested in something that wasn't free. No doubt that whole debacle didn't help WordPerfect any either.

It's kind of an interesting footnote, in the sense that I often see people posting to Slashdot that more companies should release th

Actually...They ported WP9 to Linux, it was quite a good product and worked well, they also made it available for free.They later created a "Linux version" of their whole suite, but it was basically the windows version wrapped with wine, it was slow, unstable and didn't feel like a native app. Corel also made a Linux distro which was quite well regarded... Then Microsoft invested a significant amount of money in Corel, and the Linux apps disappeared.But by the time Linux versions existed, there was very lit

You are telling me that WordPerfect: The Corporation was moving in every direction at once. You are also telling me that WordPerfect was obsessed with the cardboard box.

I'm not sure what your getting at. Microsoft also sold retail cardboard boxes for multiple platforms. (Flight Simulator for Atari, Apple etc). WordPerfect relied on authorized retailers for Sales and Support (Remember Businessland?). Word Perfect never had an OEM relationship like Microsoft because it sold a product for multiple hardware pla

I mean are you trolling or what? The article lists about a dozen anticompetitive actions MS took, including intentionally breaking compatibility with their own formats and breaking APIs Wordperfect used while using secret APIs only MS knew about in Word for better performance than any third party application could attain.

They, just like Microsoft, were more interested in making money then they ever were in providing consumer choice, or making it easier for us to transfer information. There was nothing stopping them keeping their product active.

Wordperfect is still an active product. The point of the lawsuit was MS using the fact that they were also developers of Windows to artificially create problems with WordPerfect so it was in consumers' best interests to use Word instead.

I used to use WordPerfect. It was great. Then Microsoft outmaneuvered them, and they lost. Boohoo, get over it.

And the fact that they way they did this was through criminal actions should be ignored? Sorry but it used to be that when you commit a crime for profit, you don't get to keep the profits.

Care to try and convince me that they wouldn't have done exactly the same thing to microsoft, given half a chance?

Yeah and if a cow had a chance it would eat you and your whole family. Whether Novell or Corel would have broken the law if they thought they could get away with it is immaterial. Microsoft did break the law and so the courts are acting against them.

People were shifting between companies all the time back then. Microsoft weren't some alien group, they were people with exactly the same goals and level of experience as the competition. They just had the superior business model for the day.

They still do. It is called "break the law to profit, then bribe politicians so that the fines and settlements are less than what they made by breaking the law in the first place." It works really well in our crooked system. Paying Novel fines is just part of MS's business plan, so I'm not too broken up about them having to actually return a small portion of what they made through their crimes.

OK, that explains a lot. Wonder why Telia did not notify its customers (me amongst them) as stated in that article? Also wonder what - apart from expensive multihoming - could be done to thwart these divide-and-conquer tactics by Cogent con sorte? Using a non-Telia-hosted proxy for now...

If you aren't big enough to be multihoming yourself and you want reliable connectivity to as much of the internet as possible then your best bet is to try and find an ISP large enough to be multihomed but small enough not to be playing theese games and preferablly to listen to you as a customer. Yes this will cost a bit more, yes you get what you pay for.Afaict cogents buisness model is selling hosting bandwidth dirt cheap. As such it makes sense they would stop all traffic to an ISP they want to peer with

Novell and MS have been both making deals together and suing each other for over two decades. They've been at each other's throats one minute, and posing together for photo ops while singing about peace and harmony the next since the eighties. Novell's a savvy company--they're one of the very few that's been targeted by MS for total extermination (see "Windows for Workgroups") and managed to survive. (Somehow--I'm still not sure how they pulled it off.) The latest MS/Novell deal that has so many paranoi

The simple reality is that business is about making money.You can't get all emotional and refuse deals which benefit yourself, only because they also benefit your competitor. Businesses choose the route which they think will make them the most money, sometimes that means cooperating with your worst enemy.